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Two of nation's top 10 green buildings in Wisconsin

Every year the field for the “Top Ten Green Projects,” the nation’s premiere award for green architecture granted by the American Institute of Architects, gets larger and more competitive. This year, two of the ten winning projects are in Wisconsin and both were designed by Milwaukee-area firms.

Like many of this year’s winners, the two Wisconsin structures are more than just fantastically green and drop-dead gorgeous, they set standards for innovation in other ways, too. One is a sensitive addition to an iconic Frank Lloyd Wright church, while the other reimagines what a house can be in an urban context in Racine.

Many projects under consideration for this year’s awards were more energy efficient than the addition to the Wright-designed First Unitarian Society Meeting House in Madison. But the judges honored Kubala Washatko Architects of Cedarburg for creating a gently curving structure that hugs its south-sloping site for playing well with the intense geometry of the Wright church. They also appreciated the not-too-fancy approach to sustainable design that Kubala Washatko is famous for.

The church, with about 1,400 members, is one of the largest Unitarian congregations in the country. It outgrew its Wright building, designed to seat about 200, many years ago. And several earlier efforts to expand the site had failed.

“They were loving to death the original meeting house,” said Wayne Reckard, of Kubala Washatko.

The congregation wanted to build a sustainable building to honor one of the church’s main principles, a covenant with the “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” said church administrator Susan Koenig.

“It’s just fundamental to us that we try to walk that talk,” she said. “We wanted to use the building to educate and inspire our own community to live sustainability in our daily lives.”

The $9.1 million expansion, with windows running its length and red-stained concrete floors that recall Wright’s palette, is one only a handful of additions to a commercial or church structure by Wright. Support posts of red pine from the Menominee tribal lands and limestone from Wright’s original structure add to the warm tones and cozy feel of the spaces.

The 20,000-square foot building seats 500 and includes classrooms and offices. It features recycled and locally sourced materials, CO2 sensors that trigger a ventilation system, a vegetated roof and a lighting system that takes advantage of natural sunlight. It has also nearly eliminated storm runoff, a previous problem at the site and something that was not a strong suit for Wright.

The second award winner, the OS House in Racine, is part of an increasingly inventive sphere of design known as “micro architecture” – small, beautiful homes that rethink living spaces. The house represents a level of architectural ambition that has rarely been seen in Racine since Wright made his mark there a generation ago with projects such as the S.C. Johnson Wax headquarters, about a mile away.

The bedrooms, bathrooms and closets in the home, which overlooks Lake Michigan, are of a scale more akin to houses built in the 1970s. With a footprint of 1,950 square feet, though, the Racine home does not make its boldest statement through petiteness alone.

It has attracted a steady parade of gawkers for its unusual looks, an exterior with touches of bright color and industrial materials such as steel and glass. It is deftly inserted into the scale of the neighborhood – its rhythms, heights and setbacks – and looks like an elegant, rectangular shape with volumes lifted and slid out of it.

As one of the first LEED platinum homes in the upper Midwest, and only the third in Wisconsin, it has been granted the highest certification possible for energy efficiency and sustainable practices from the U.S. Green Building Council. It has also now won four AIA awards.

“There is still a lack of good residential architecture that is both architecturally valid and sustainable,” said Sebastian Schmaling, who said this award was the most significant prize the house had snagged to date. “It is still a pretty small crowd.”

This is even more true in an urban context, a fact the judges noted in their comments.

“It was about the context,” said Lauren Yarmuth, of YRG New York and one of the jurors for the competition. The project changed “the paradigm of what a house can be” in an urban environment, she said.

The other award winners were Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles, by BROOKS + SCARPA; the Kiowa County K-12 Schools in Greenburg, Kan., by BNIM Architects; High Tech High in Chula Vista, Calif., by Studio E Architects; the LIVESTRONG Foundation in Austin, Texas, by Lake Flato Architects; LOTT Clean Water Alliance in Olympia, Wash., by The Miller Hull Partnership; Research Support Facility at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., by RNL Design; Step Up on 5th in Santa Monica, Calif., by BROOKS + SCARPA; and the Vancouver Convention Center West by LMN Architects and Prime Architects.

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists.

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